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Saturday, 9 March 2019

The explosive memo advising the cabinet as Theresa May battles to win Tuesday’s second meaningful vote - warns that supporting any amendment re-tabled by Labour’s Yvette
Cooper and Tories Oliver Letwin and Nick Boles could pave the way for a
bill to change the day of our EU exit and bind the Government into a
permanent customs union.

May's moronic 2017 election left her too weak to sack the saboteurs within her government who now seek, with a cross-party cabal of anti-democrats led by Yvette Cooper and Nick Boles, to destroy what vestige of control May has left of the Brexit process.

It is little consolation now that Boles, Letwin, Hammond, Rudd, Gauke, Clarke and Hancock will have no future in the Conservative party - over 70% of whose members are committed to Brexit.

The system works because everyone behaves by the rules. On either side of the bargain—the governed and the government—mutual obligations are observed in service of the common interest, which is the stable continuance of a non-tyrannical political order. Here we come to the disquieting part of the continuing Remain campaign, a campaign that seemingly supersedes party loyalty, not to mention national loyalty, which is its willingness to throw away the rulebook. Only a brazenly confidant, or foolishly out-of-touch, political class would chance this. The bet on the future is doubled.

The object of all these machinations has been to corral the British population into a Hobson's choice between Brexit-In-Name-Only and no-Brexit. It is no secret now. The plotters, finally, so close to the bell calling time on Britain's membership of the EU with a deal or without one, have declared it openly that they will not permit to occur what is the current legally mandated outcome of events. They will instead tie the government in knots, prevent its preparations for No Deal Brexit, and if necessary, crash it.

The consequences of this sabotage of the most significant vote in British history by 17.4m electors is likely to be dire

Historical parallels are inexact at the best to times but one doesn't have to look too far back to see where the corrosion of democratic legitimacy can and probably will lead. It leads to extreme societal polarisation, and a miasmic concoction of fear, radicalisation and violence. We can see this in the condition that is currently afflicting France and its yellow jacket uprisings. We saw it in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s when the country slid into the anni di piombo – the years of the bullet. And, most insidiously, we saw it in the actions of the Latin American governments and their so-called dirty wars, in which sections of the population fought each other openly and covertly.

We have for decades studied why things fall apart, how a stable, essentially self-policing, productive society can turn into an ungovernable tumult roiling with rage. We know that this happens at first very slowly, a creep-creep-creeping to the limit; and then very fast indeed after the limit has been passed. We also know that no amount of free beer and pizza parties will swiftly return a society deranged by the shattering of the social contract by its own elite back to normality.

One can imagine how the nightmare could unfold. It could possibly start slowly enough; bricks through the windows of government offices around the country, through the windows of MPs offices, then Molotov cocktails. Remain MPs from Leave constituencies who have been complicit in this undermining of the democratic process may need police or army protection to visit their own constituencies, and then, as the powers over-react in a crackdown, as always seems to happen, a cathartic explosion of anger and violence that will roil and sweep across many parts of Britain.

The Government is expected to speak with one voice. Parliament’s role is to scrutinise the work of Government, pass laws and control money. These democratic principles have retained the confidence of voters through two world wars, the general strike, hyperinflation, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair. They are being carelessly trashed by a weak government, which is willingly being held to ransom by those determined to stop Brexit. The final step will be this government choosing to allow MPs to undo the vote of June 2016 altogether.

And when that moment comes, we mustn’t forget that it wasn’t Leavers, Remainers or even a divisive referendum that brought us there: it was our elected representatives thwarting democracy.

I loathe and hate rioting and disorder, and I deprecate more deeply than I can describe the deep and painful divisions in our land that Brexit has caused. But a betrayal of democracy by a British Parliament next week in the manner feared will be the grossest insult to the people, and one I fear, if Betz and Smith are right in their analysis, that won't be borne.

Friday, 8 March 2019

Bridget Prentice, who used to be my MP, left the Commons when scandals about her expenses mis-spending began to emerge. I was about to present evidence of her using Parliamentary expenses to subsidise the running of a constituency Labour Party office when she threw in the towel. She ligged a job as an electoral commissioner which came to an end in September 2018 - putting her well within the frame of the 'Corrupt Commission' that acted so partially against Brexit bodies that it was condemned as 'not fit for purpose' by leading politicians. Anyway, back in 2008 I wrote to her over the mismanagement of the Met Police - a mismanagement that has got far worse since.

Here in the borough of Lewisham we pay the salaries of around a thousand Metropolitan police officers - our share of the 32,000 strong force. Yet where are they? Our homes can be burgled, fouled and violated, the possessions of a lifetime stolen and trashed, and we are told it's no longer a concern of the police - we're invited to leave our details on an answerphone. This year nearly thirty teenage boys have been knifed to death in London, yet on the buses and in Lewisham market at the end of the school day are scores of knife-carrying teens terrifying each other and causing public fear.

She replied

I do not believe that life in Lewisham is as grim, unappealing and crime ridden as you portray in your letter. If you feel that 'knife-carrying teens' are terrorising 'the buses' and 'Lewisham market' I suggest then that you raise the matter with the police.

The arrogance and contempt of her response was quite typical - Bridget was never a clever woman, and I doubt she had ridden on a bus or visited Lewisham Market since being elected. It is exactly her brand of purblind ignorance that has seen the numbers of dead children in London multiply in just ten years - the young corpses no longer confined to black-on-black violence but claiming victims who really did stand chances of becoming architects or doctors. Yet there is something surprising about this - take a look at the Met's stats

Boris served as Mayor from 2008 to 2016. His first term was dominated by the Olympics - but in his second term, he concentrated his efforts on knife crime, with some success. Then two things happened. From 2015, Theresa May, as Home Secretary, prevented police from carrying out stop and search - and in 2016 Sadiq Khan took post as Mayor of London.

London is now stuck with exactly the same brand of asinine, purblind social democrat stupidity that we had before 2008; there is little to choose between Bridget Prentice and Theresa May in terms of (in)ability, and Khan is as robust and effective as a feather in the wind. May is even now defending her appalling tenure as Home Secretary, and the vain, preening little Khan has only an eye for photo opportunities rather than dead teens.

For whatever reason, the number of fatal stabbings is increasing - counter intuitively, for if the volume of knife crime is what it was in 2008 with thirty dead, one would expect a learning curve in trauma medicine and response to have lowered lethality.

Perhaps now that normal middle-class grammar school kids are bleeding to death in the gutter, London's Labour mafia and their tame Prime Minister might take notice.

Thursday, 7 March 2019

If was some forty years before Suez, and not in the heat of the Egyptian desert but in the cold dark of the North Sea that Admiral Beatty commented, as two of his prized battlecruisers blew up at Jutland, "There's something wrong with our bloody ships today". The nation, schooled in an invincible navy, in a formidable fleet, found the losses hard to swallow. Likewise, in a Britain schooled in the notion of a Rolls-Royce civil service, in which the best and brightest in the land devote lives to the nation, and as highly competent mandarins steer the great ship of state with skill and dedication, we are faced with the abject failure of Whitehall.

There's something wrong with the bastards today. Despite May's manifest stubborn stupidity, despite her lunacy in treating Brexit, as Nick Timothy described, as a damage limitation exercise, they should never have permitted her ignorance and idiocy to plunge the United Kingdom into the greatest failure of Statecraft since Suez, as Allister Heath phrases it.

'Boomer' Cox is a caricature, a character from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera or one of the supporting cast of Mortimer's Rumpole. Skilled neither in this specialist area of the law or in statesmanship, his mission has quite predictably failed. The Commons team of eight legal experts have nothing to scrutinise.

The EU will not move a millimetre because it is their sole aim to damage, hurt and humiliate Britain, a repeat Versailles. In this they are assisted by May's scabrous government and a Parliament that still refuses to accept that a majority of voters, 17.4m electors, sealed a mandate to Leave.

Well, sooner or later they must face the ballot box. Any notion they may have that the public anger at her capitulation, at the failure of my party to prevent it, will be forgotten is naive. We have not forgiven Blair for 2003, nor will we. Our memories are long and we carry a grudge deeply. They will not, they cannot succeed in preventing our exit from a failed EU - we only question how much suffering and humiliation will they inflict on Britain before they realise this. The more they prolong it, the greater the force with which they will be thrown from office.

Wednesday, 6 March 2019

The extraordinary document that emerged from the Élysée on Monday night was at first glance in-credible. I thought it was a clever spoof. But no. It seems that M.Macron had kissed his grannie good morning, scoffed his croissant and sat himself down at the big gold desk in his Palace and built his own fantasy SimEU.

Here is the barracks with the SimEU army, here the detention prison of the SimEU Office of Internal Security; here is the SimEU Central Bank and the SimEU Ministry of Finance. And the whole thing populated by busy and happy little SimEU citizens on SimEU minimum wage playing safely on social media regulated by the SimEU Prefecture for Internet Safety, after a hard day's work inventing innovative new Euro things at the SimEU Creative Foundation.

Really, I'm hardly joking. The whole document, of which he is inordinately proud, reads just like a teenage boy's fantasy world. The document even has the Heroes of SimEU, the French and German Leaders, waving graciously from the balconies of their SimEU palaces at crowds of adoring SimEU citizens.

He even addressed it to the "Citoyens d’Europe" despite the Federacy having only 61% of the continent's population under its flag. This degree of self-delusion was not lost on Henry Newman, who replied to Macron via his Telegraph column

I was struck that your letter largely conflates Europe with the EU, eliding the distinction between a political union of 27 members and the broader concerns of our continent which includes proud nations such as Switzerland, Norway and - soon - the UK, which are friends and allies of the EU but outside of that political bloc. Your letter has various suggestions for improving the EU. Some may be welcome, others less so. But each proposal involves the EU gaining further powers and greater influence over people’s lives, at the expense of sovereign states, when we both know that right across the bloc a strong majority want the EU to do the precise opposite. For you, it seems the answer to every question is always more Brussels.

Had this letter been written and published in the late 1990s, at the heights of EU hubris, before the foundations of the Federacy started to show cracks, it might, just might, have been hailed as a visionary manifesto for an ideal EU Central State, authoritarian but benign. But we're now in the second decade of the following century, the UK has left and the remaining 27 are split on everything from migration to finance, the currency is tanking, the economy is sclerotic and the streets are filled with tear gas and blinded Gilets jaunes.

That the President of France is so deluded, so out of touch with the reality of political possibility, so unrealistic about his expectations is of deep concern. Our teenage fantasist really believes he can secure a date with Jennifer Aniston.

Tuesday, 5 March 2019

As annoying as greengrocers' apostrophes (though I doubt anyone much under 50 who doesn't live in Chelsea or some equally expensive Chiltern market town will ever have seen one) is the habit of EU zealots in referring to the EU as 'Europe'. It isn't.

Manfred Weber, one of the EU's rising bureaucrats, with reference to EP elections in the UK if Brexit is delayed beyond June, is quoted as saying "That means for me for the future of the continent, for the future of the European Union, Great Britain cannot have any more say. That means for me, in the next European elections, Great Britain cannot participate."

His English puts my German to shame, and is marked as authentic German English by his use of 'that' when he means 'this'. All good German English speakers make the same mistake. But that's not the point. This is;

Population of Europe ... 726m
Population of EU27 ......446m (61%)
Population of UK ......66m (9%)

Manfred might like to put his English textbooks away and brush the dust off his maths primer. The EU only has 61% of the people of the continent of Europe, of which the UK is a populous part with 9% of its inhabitants. We therefore very much have a say in the future of the continent. Just not in the play elections for a play 'Parliament' in which all is decided in advance and MEPs mired in greed care more about signing in for ten minutes for their per diem than in democracy.

Update
=====
This is the same Manfred Weber who was found in 2017 to be claiming €4,342 a month (tax free) for an office in his home country (Bavaria) to allow citizens to easily access they MEP. Only Manfred is paying the money to himself - and his ghost 'office' sits in an annex to Manfred's luxury house, far away from population and transport hubs in an exclusive and wealthy neighbourhood.

Monday, 4 March 2019

One hundred years ago Germany was humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles.

The German delegation was summoned to Versailles and presented with the terms of the Treaty - massive reparations to be paid, a land-grab, onerous restrictions on Germany's future freedoms, continuing interference by the allies in Germany's affairs. The German delegation was told negotiation of the terms was not possible - it was take it or leave it.

Germany's first democratically elected PM, Philipp Scheidemann, resigned rather than sign such a treaty. In an impassioned speech he said

Which hand, trying to put us in chains like these, would not wither? The treaty is unacceptable.

But after Scheidemann, Ebert, as we know, did sign. It later cost him his life. The humiliation of the treaty was so unbearable for Germany it barely lasted fourteen years before conditions allowed Hitler to take power.

It is said that if we fail to learn from the errors of history we are forced to repeat them. As I see Selmayr's smug Moonface smiling superciliously as Britain is forced to accept the Robbins-Selmayr Treaty, a cursed document every bit as humiliating for Britain as Versailles was for Germany, my only surprise is that he is not forcing May to sign it in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiegne.

Sunday, 3 March 2019

Map day today. I must admit I'm a bit of a map and chart geek; ever since I learnt how to read - I mean really read - the 1" OS edition as a child, they've fascinated me. My father's stint as an instructor, trying to teach young army officers how to map read (a frustrating period of his military career) left me with three War Office manuals the contents of which I absorbed like blotting paper, so even now I can scan a mass of contour lines and identify dead ground, fields of fire, arty FO points and so on. Not much use on a Sunday ramble in the country, but better fun than twiddling with a bloody mobile phone when on a walk. Yes, I mean you. You know who you are.

Right. Below are a pair of Worldmapper cartograms for 2018 population and GDP - each country's area on the map is relative to the magnitude of these factors.

Each country, no matter how geographically large or small, no matter how big its population, no matter how great or insignificant its wealth, has one vote in the UN General Assembly, an equal chance of a rotating seat on the Security Council and a fair go at all the lucrative posts. Indeed, since its inception (the original United Nations were the allies who defeated German fascism and Japanese militarism, the permanent SC members) its Secretary-Generals have all been drawn from the smaller nations; Norway, Sweden, Burma, Austria, Peru, Egypt, Ghana, South Korea and Portugal.

Given that there are far more small, poor nations than large, rich nations how would you imagine an organisation so constituted would evolve, over time, its mission, objectives and strategy? Yep. It's not some tinfoil conspiracy theory or lizard takeover plot - the natural progression for the UN since 1947 has been towards making smaller poorer countries richer and more powerful. Unfortunately, the consequence over the past twenty years has been the economic decimation of the working and middle classes in the higher-GDP lower-population developed world.

Two factors are at play - often confused but actually quite separate. Globalization and Globalism. Globalization is a change that has come about through advances in communication technology, trade, transport, education, and aid and outreach programmes that have spread medicine, infrastructure, agrarian science, and post-Enlightenment culture across the globe. Globalism is a movement to establish government, legal systems, economic systems and corporate entities without hindrance of national borders across the globe. It is therefore Globalism that drives the agenda of the UN - in concert with other supranational bodies working to the same ends; the EU, World Bank, IMF and WTO.

Lost in the noise of Brexit, the UN endorsed the Global Migration Compact in December 2018. Several nations refused to sign up - Austria, Australia, Bulgaria, Chile, Czech Republic, Dominica, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Israel, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland and the USA. Our own government agreed it - on the basis that it is 'non-binding' under international law. However, as New Zealand's law officers have warned, non-binding does not mean legally irrelevant - and "courts may be willing...to refer to the Compact and to take the Compact
into account as an aid in interpreting immigration legislation". This applies also to both UK courts and the ECHR and ECJ.

The migration compact is an unashamedly Globalist policy instrument - to the disadvantage of the peoples of the developed nations, but to the benefit of both Globalist corporations and organisations. In addition, it will shape future EU legislation, which will be framed so as not to contradict or act against the intentions of the Compact.

I do apologise for the uncharacteristic 'Globalism 101' tone of this post - this is for the benefit of our new readers, who have only the most basic notion of how political policy evolves into action. In the past few weeks I've realised how my old dad felt in trying patiently but unsuccessfully to teach somewhat dim young subalterns the difference between the contour lines of a spur and a gully.